Santa Claus Has Nothing To Do With It
by nicalyse
Summary: "It's pronounced 'potato pancake,' you goy." One-shot.


Don't tell anyone, but Puck loves being married.

There was a time when he thought that he was going to be the perpetual bachelor, like Hugh Hefner. Puck was going to be such a stud that the pussy would come to him instead of the other way around. He'd be a legend.

Then there was the stuff with Quinn and the stuff with Shelby and actually getting the opportunity to be in Beth's life a little bit, and he realized how much he wanted to have a family. And no, things didn't work with either Quinn or Shelby (they really weren't meant to either, he knows), but all of that did show him how much better things were when he let someone in the way he'd always been unwilling to before.

By the time he found out that Hugh Hefner had been married and had a couple of kids, the guy wasn't his idol any more. (Even if Puck is still grateful to the dude for _Playboy_ and thinks Hef's totally badass.)

Puck didn't limit himself. Even after he'd decided that he did want to get married and have a house full of his own kids someday, he wasn't going to pass on the opportunity to _live_. College was a series of relationships, mostly of the one-night variety interspersed with a couple of serious things, and there was a kind of messy thing with Rachel when she was in Chicago for a year after graduation doing a couple of shows before she went back to New York. (He's always going to have a soft spot for that girl, and the guy who finally locks that down is going to be one lucky bastard, but it isn't going to be Puck.)

It sounds fucking stupid, but he and Santana ended up together by accident. He saw her on the news one morning when he was drinking the last of his coffee before heading out to work (he works with the mayor's office, which is a huge surprise and also not nearly as boring as one might expect), standing in front of a police precinct and talking about some arsonist who had been aprehended the night before. He looked her up on the station's website when he got to work. She'd apparently worked her ass off to get through school in three years, then started doing anything and everything she could to get herself on-air at the Chicago station where she'd started out doing an internship.

It's a long story, but they started hanging out, and one thing led to another, and now, three years later, she's anchoring the early evening news (and is eying the late evening news spot like a cat watching a mouse), they've been married for almost a year, and she's five months pregnant.

Seriously, it's almost embarrassing how much Puck loves his life.

* * *

><p>Religion didn't even rank as a consideration for their kid until the holidays rolled around. Puck is Jewish and Santana is Catholic, but neither of them are practicing, so it isn't like it comes up every day, and eloping in Vegas took care of arguing about what kind of wedding ceremony to have. But they split Thanksgiving between her family and his, and everyone seems to want to know whether the tadpole in Santana's belly is going to have a bar mitzvah or a first communion, and neither of them has any idea how to answer the question. Puck doesn't think they should be worrying about it at all since those things are about a decade away.<p>

"And stop calling it a tadpole," Santana snaps, fastening her seatbelt when Puck pulls away from a gas station just outside of Lima.

He rolls his eyes, but he has the good sense to keep his mouth shut. She's been parroting all the shit that his mom and her parents said all day since they pulled out of the driveway at his mom's house twenty minutes ago. She's all fired up about everyone thinking that their opinions matter, which doesn't have anything to do with him, but he knows his wife. If he isn't careful, this is going to turn into a stupid fight, and he'd like to actually have a conversation about it now that it's been brought up.

"Well, what do you think?" he asks when she pauses to take a breath. He glances over and sees her staring back at him. "Everyone else thinks it's a big deal, but what do you think?"

"Isn't it traditional for a child to take his mother's religion?"

"Isn't it traditional for a Jew not to marry a lapsed Catholic?" he counters, teasing. She scoffs. "Do you want the baby to be Catholic?"

"Not really," she admits into the darkness. "There's so much guilt and so much judgment. I ended up married to you, but what if I'd ended up with a woman, Noah?"

He reaches across the console for her hand, slipping his fingers between hers and flattening their palms together. Santana went through a _lot_ to get to where she is today.

"But there's Christmas," she goes on, "and Easter, and however you feel about Jesus being the messiah or whatever, he had the right ideas about how we should all be treating each other." He chuckles. "What do you think?"

He shrugs even though she probably can't see it. "I always imagined my kid being Jewish. It's my heritage, you know? And it isn't just some religion that I chose, like some people do. It's my history. My ancestors walked through the desert and shit."

For a few minutes, the only sound in the car is the radio, a station taking advantage of the fact that it's Thanksgiving and playing some Brenda Lee. He's thinking about his kid and its future, and he knows Santana is doing the same.

Puck wants his kid to be Jewish, plain and simple, but not at the expense of what Santana wants for her kid. It's just that Puck is proud of being a Jew. He's _proud_ of the history there, and even though he thinks the whole 'no unclean meats' thing is dumb, he generally thinks that Jews have the right idea. Santana's right; from what he's seen, being a Christian is all about being guilty for doing things that are 'bad,' and it sucks. He's seen how badly it can fuck someone up, and he doesn't want his kid to ever have to think about something that way.

They don't have to decide right away how this baby is going to live the rest of his life, so he isn't too worried about this conversation right this second, but he's definitely willing to defend himself if he needs to. He isn't going to give up raising his kid as a Jew without at least having a discussion.

"What if we just do both?" Santana asks after a while. She twists in her seat to face him, reaching up to flip on the dome light so she can see his face. "He can be Jewish and Catholic, and we'll each teach her stuff." They haven't found out the sex of the baby, so they use all the pronouns. Puck thinks it's funny. "We'll have Christmas and Hanukkah, and we'll do Passover and dye Easter eggs or whatever."

"Easter eggs are pagan," Puck says before he can stop himself. Santana gives him a weird look. "Abby told me."

She rolls her eyes. "You know what I mean, Puck. Instead of having to choose and piss off one of our families, we'll do both and piss off everybody."

He's laughing when he leans over to kiss her cheek quickly before focusing his attention back on the highway.

She falls asleep just past the Indiana state line, her hand going totally limp in Puck's. Tonight makes him think about the last time they had a serious conversation in the car on the way from Lima back to Chicago, when they realized that telling their parents that they were planning to get married was going to open an enormous can of worms and decided that they would elope and then tell everyone that they'd already done it.

He likes that they tend to have the same ideas about how best to communicate. It makes him feel pretty sure that he made the right choice, marrying Santana.

* * *

><p>When Santana wakes Puck up one morning with her hand wrapped around his cock, whispering the words, "teach me how to be a Jew, Noah" in his ear, he's fucking confused.<p>

It's all about priorities though, and her orgasms have been insane with this pregnancy, so he waits until after he's made her fall apart (twice, thanks, and the second time with and honest to god scream) to ask her to explain what the fuck she's talking about.

She's glaring at him when she closes the refrigerator door, a bottle of orange juice in her hand. "I just want to know what I'm getting into with this 'raising my kid Jewish' thing."

"What does that even mean, baby?" he asks, watching her pour a glass of juice.

She leans back against the counter and takes a sip. "Do you realize that I've never gone to temple with you?"

He hadn't, but now that he think about it, she's right. Truthfully though, he's pretty sure the last time he went to temple himself was with his mom and his sister when he and Santana were in Lima for Abby's graduation. Sure, his faith is important, but in a more...theoretical way, really. The fact that he doesn't go to temple doesn't make him less Jewish or whatever.

"And you haven't ever been to church with me," she goes on. "So I want to do the whole thing. I want to go to temple, and I want to do the Friday sabbath thing, and I want to celebrate Hanukkah for real this year. And we'll find a church to go to, and we'll actually pay attention to the Christ parts of Christmas."

Puck smiles at her, crossing the kitchen so he can stand in front of her slide his hands from the front of her belly to sit on her waist. "I love you," he tells her softly, because it's true and he wants to.

"I love you, too. And I want to," she admits quietly, looking up through her eyelashes at him. " To do all that. I just...I want to." She shrugs her shoulders and brings the hand that isn't holding her juice up to cup his cheek. "Please?"

Santana has always been hard to say no to, but like this? Standing in front of him, looking at him like this, and with their baby between them?

Of course he agrees.

* * *

><p>"I'm home!" Santana calls from the front door of the condo, accompanied by the tell-tale rustle of shopping bags. Since that's what she went out early this afternoon to do - Christmas shopping - Puck isn't surprised.<p>

This is immediately followed by, "Jesus Christ, what smells so fucking good?"

She appears in the the kitchen doorway with her eyes wide and her coat gaping open. "Seriously. What are you cooking?"

"Chicken," he answers simply, just to be a dick. He's standing at the counter grating a potato into a bowl, so he obviously isn't just making chicken, even if that is what she's smelling. "Go put your stuff away. Then you can help me."

She looks at him like he's crazy. "Excuse me?"

"You're gonna learn how to cook like a Jew, baby."

* * *

><p>Santana 'cooking like a Jew' lasts as long as it takes her to squeeze the excess liquid out of the potatoes and onions, then she's distracted by the bowl of homemade applesauce waiting on the counter. The chicken is resting on the breakfast bar, waiting to be carved, and the string beans are keeping warm in a pan on a back burner, so the only thing left is to fry the latkes.<p>

Santana is perched on the counter next to the stove, watching Puck cook and dipping a spoon into the applesauce often enough that he's glad there's more in the fridge. He put the chicken on the breakfast bar deliberately, because he knows her; she'd be picking at it if it was beside her.

She watches silently while he spoons batter into the hot oil. "Is it pronounced _lot-kuh_ or _lot-key_?" she asks when he sets down the bowl.

"It's pronounced 'potato pancake,' you goy," he laughs, dodging the hand that shoots out to swat at his arm. "They're both right," he tells her, answering her real question. "It's like _in_velope or _on_velope." He shrugs.

"And you fry things because the miracle was the oil, right?"

He can't help grinning at her. "Right."

She bites her bottom lip and looks up at him from under her eyelashes. "Does that mean you're going to make me doughnuts, too?"

He finishes flipping the last latke, then slides over so he's standing in front of her, between her knees, slipping his hand into her hair and leaning forward to kiss her soundly. "No." He kisses her again when she starts to pout, drawing her lower lip between his. "You know that place on Lake Avenue?" he murmurs against her mouth. It's a tiny, gourmet pastry shop they found a while back, and Puck happens to know that doughtnuts are one of the fancy little things they make. "I'll take you there tomorrow," he tells her when she nods.

She moans into his mouth, which makes it really hard to pull away from her, but potato pancakes wait for no man.

Or pregnant woman.

The next time Santana moans, it's around a bite of latke.

They're eating by candlelight in the dining room (Santana says it's appropriate, and he isn't inclined to disagree), the menorah with its four burning candles just visible in the living room window through the doorway.

"I forgot how good these are," she says, talking with her mouth full. "Why are they so good?"

"'Cause fried potatoes are always good." She lets out a hum of agreement, then starts pushing herself back from the table. "Where are you going?"

She stands and walks quickly toward the kitchen. "I know how to make them better," she calls behind her.

Puck figures that she's after the salt. The pregnancy has been fucking with her taste buds, and it's like he can't salt things enough for her. He makes a mental note to say something about it the next time he's with her at the doctor, just so he can be sure that it can't cause any problems.

"Are you serious?" he asks when she comes back with a jar of salsa.

He watches in disbelief as she spoons some of the salsa onto a latke, then forks an enormous bite into her mouth. "God, Noah. _This_ is delicious." He blinks at her. "Want to taste?"

"No." Her eyebrows come together in confusion. "Are you serious right now?" he repeats. "Salsa?"

She rolls her eyes and cuts off a bite of chicken. "It's good," she insists. He watches her take another bite of latke, this one with a bit of sour cream. "Besides, it's like you and me on a plate, baby."

"_What?_"

"Latkes and salsa."

He laughs so hard that it makes his abs ache, and Santana's face gets all pink and gorgeous when she laughs like this.

He hopes his kid gets her smile.


End file.
